Re: Haystack group meeting notes, September 14, 2004

From: Eric Miller <em_at_w3.org>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 15:24:31 -0400

Thanks Steve. Much appreciated.

--
eric miller                              http://www.w3.org/people/em/
semantic web activity lead               http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
w3c world wide web consortium            http://www.w3.org/
On Sep 20, 2004, at 3:21 PM, Stephen J. Garland wrote:
> Progress reports and introductions
>
> Jamie Teevan (PhD student) is working on HCI issues for how people 
> return to
> information (and on being a new mom). She is also organizing the HCI 
> seminar for
> the Fall.
>
> David Huynh (PhD student) is finishing up a paper on his work at 
> Microsoft last
> summer (on visualization tools for large collections of photographs). 
> This term,
> he is looking at possible topics for his PhD dissertation. One 
> possible topic
> concerns how to make security more visible and understandable in web
> applications (e.g., by detecting bogus sites that fish for personal 
> information
> by masquerading as other sites).
>
> Marios Assiotis (new UROP) worked at Apple last summer on the user 
> interface for
> an internal Applie application.
>
> Ryan Manuel (MEng student) is working on wrapper induction (finding 
> patterns on
> a web page). He is extending previous work by Andrew Hogue to consider 
> links,
> and not just text, on a page. He has also ported the wrapper induction 
> code from
> Internet Explorer to Mozilla, although there are still a few glitches 
> when the
> code is run under Linux.
>
> Yuan Shen (PhD student) is working on how to recognize and extract 
> records from
> web pages (such as search results and directory listings) using 
> algorithms that
> look for similarities and repeated subtrees on a page. His canonical 
> test page
> is the CSAIL directory page. A current glitch in his algorithm causes 
> it to
> detect navigation bars as records.
>
> Nick Matsakis (PhD student) is writing a proposal for his PhD thesis on
> identifying object references. He has talked with members of his thesis
> committee (Leslie Kaelbling and Randy Davis) and is reading about 
> conditional
> Markov random fields. He will give a short talk about his work at next 
> week's
> meeting.
>
> Zane Tian and Sumudu Watugala (new UROPs) worked with Dennis Quan last 
> summer at
> IBM to create prototype for connecting semantically tagged web 
> services. They
> developed an ontology for workflows by modifying the Haystack UI for
> collections. It is not clear whether their code will be contributed to 
> the open
> source code base, or remain IBM internal.
>
> Artem Gleyzer (UROP) worked this past summer on tools that users can 
> employ to
> annotate and export parts of the RDF graph. Instead of exporting a 
> default
> subgraph for each type of resource, his tools are designed to export
> task-related subgraphs. David Karger suggests that the ability to save 
> data from
> Haystack (by exporting it to a file) makes it possible (and desirable) 
> for group
> members to begin using Haystack regularly for one or more of their 
> normal
> information tasks.
>
> Harr Chen (new PhD student) has worked at Microsoft on extending web 
> searches to
> topic-specific searches and on providing server-based help (that uses
> classifiers to train on click-through data).
>
> Steve Garland (Principal Research Scientist) worked this past summer on
> extracting a minimal (more accurately, a moderately sized) subset of 
> haystack to
> serve as a more manageable base for application development. He will 
> talk about
> this subset at next week's group meeting.
>
> Amanda Smith (UROP) worked this past summer on a help ontology and 
> system for
> haystack. In her system, every object has a separate help view. 
> Objects can be
> annotated currently using the code editor; a later extension will make 
> it
> possible to annotate objects using the Haystack UI. This term, Amanda 
> may leave
> to Haystack group to work with Regina Barzilay.
>
> Vineet Sinha (PhD) student is currently out of town.
>
> Administrivia
>
> Weekly group meetings will be held over lunch (provided) each Tuesday 
> at noon in
> 32-G531. This year, the agenda for group meetings will be organized 
> around two
> or three short presentations by group members on what they have been 
> doing, on
> interesting papers they have read in the literature, etc. Steve and 
> Nick will
> talk at next week's meeting.
>
> Instead of going around the table with status reports at each group 
> meeting, we
> will be using the Haystack Wiki, http://haystack-wiki.csail.mit.edu, 
> to track
> progress. Time will still be available at meetings, however, for 
> people to
> describe problems they have been encountering in their work and to 
> solicit
> feedback.
>
> The following weekly individual meeting times were scheduled with 
> David Karger:
> (Mo 4pm Harr, Tu 2pm Jaime, Tu 3pm Nick, We 4pm Yuan, Th 1pm David H, 
> Th 2pm
> Ryan).
>
>

Received on Mon Sep 20 2004 - 19:24:28 EDT